Page 93 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

contributed to a debate about the crime of mugging (1978). In a
‘spiral of deviance’ the press first highlighted the ‘problem’—which,
these authors showed, emerged primarily as a consequence of changes
in policing policy in London—gave it a meaning in terms of the UK’s
‘copying’ of American crime waves (a pattern repeated in more recent
discussions of ‘crack’, ‘yardies’, and the rise in illegally held firearms);
articulated ‘public outrage’ about this crime wave, and encouraged
the judiciary to come down hard on convicted ‘muggers’. The press
were major contributors, in short, to the creation of a moral and
political climate of enhanced police repression, which had very real
consequences for young blacks in Britain. Following the massacre of
schoolchildren and their teacher by a gunman at Dunblane in 1996,
the press actively campaigned for the introduction of draconian
restrictions on firearms—even those used by competitors in Olympic
shooting competition. Like the case of ‘devil dogs’ in the early 1990s,
when a wave of savaging incidents by pit bull terriers and Rottweilers
resulted in ill-thought out and ineffective legislation to clamp down
on ‘dangerous dogs’, the anger and revulsion caused by the Dunblane
incident was seized on by the press to push politicians into what
many observers regarded as hasty, vote-catching legislation, of little
practical relevance to the circumstances which caused the killings in
Dunblane to occur.

THE PUBLIC VOICE OF THE PRESS

While news can be and frequently is used in the manner described
here, there are more ‘authored’ forms of political intervention
available to the press. The most important ‘voice’ of a newspaper
is its editorial, which embodies its political identity. It also, as Hall
et al. noted in Policing the Crisis, seeks to articulate what the
newspaper’s editors believe to be the collective voice of its readers.
Hence, editorials in the Sun and the Sunday Times, although
expressing fundamentally similar political viewpoints, determined
largely by the opinions of proprietor Rupert Murdoch, will address
the issues of the day in completely different terms. The Sun claims
to ‘speak’ for the working classes, voicing their frequently racist,
sexist and xenophobic prejudices, while at the same time
irreverential and critical of the establishment, whether it be in the
form of Royal ‘scroungers’, gay judges, or two-timing Tory
politicians. The Sunday Times, also basically supportive of the
Conservative Party (in the 1997 election, the Sunday Times

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